A Forest, Not a Plantation.

There is something different about a site you visit that has no continuous feed. You have in all likelihood come here on purpose. The algorithm is not trying to learn what kind of stranger you are. The site is not going to offer up a suggestion of something else that might interest you. There is nothing like that happening here. It just sits, happily unconnected. Unconcerned.

This fledgling site runs on Ghost - an independent publishing platform for writers and makers. I have been quietly debating with myself for a while how and where this work could live. Most of the usual options lean too heavily into agriculture - if I can use that metaphor. Harvesting data. Engagement farming. Newsletters that live inside larger platforms with their own attention economies. Social tools designed, in the end, to keep your eyes moving. Even the kindest of these - the ones I have used with pleasure - are still a kind of farming. The crop is attention. The soil is us.

Rewilding is a term that has been doing useful work in environmental thinking lately, and a smaller but related body of writing has been borrowing it for the internet. Letting a piece of land go back to its own complexity. Removing the management - the ploughing, the fencing, the optimisation - and allowing the place to remember what it wanted to be when no-one was trying to extract anything from it. Rewilding does not mean going back. It is not nostalgia for an earlier moment of the land. It is letting it move forward towards something that has not been allowed to happen for a long time. Insects arrive. Predators come.

The internet has been farmed hard. Whole genres of work have been shaped to fit the harvester. Shorter posts. Hooks. Threads. Captions made for the scroll rather than the page. I am very much a part of this. But I also want to be the publishing equivalent of the field at the back of the farm. The corner the tractor doesn't reach. The bit where, if you waited long enough, you might find foxgloves and brambles and a bird that wasn't a part of it a year ago.

You would be hard put to recall it now, but there was a time the internet was something of a forest. It was weird and sprawling. You would come across strangers on a personal blog with a terrible design, waxing lyrical on some niche obsession, and you would follow a link and get lost in the best possible way.

Then a few companies came along and saw the mess for what it was: inefficiency. They herded us onto a couple of very large platforms and suddenly everything was peachy. We had our convenience and an audience, they were left with our data and attention, and a neat little harvest of all the sociability we had accumulated over centuries of letter-writing and trust.

But look at it now. The soil is collapsing, the feeds are thin and disease has free rein. Two firms account for 99 per cent of the software in your pocket, another does nine-tenths of the searching in the world.

Ghost is, for me, that corner of the field. There are technical reasons. It is open-source. The email list is mine. The domain is mine. Nothing about my work is sitting on someone else's land. But the deeper reason is what is missing. There is no feed inside Ghost. No Notes layer trying to keep me posting. No engagement dashboard nudging me up a leaderboard I never asked to be on. When I sit down inside this creative space, nothing is asking anything of me except that I write or make images.

It's a small thing, until you notice it. The harvester, when it visits, leaves its prints on the sentence. You begin writing for the headline before you have the thought. You shorten the piece because you suspect attention will not last. You bend toward the kind of upload the algorithm rewards. None of this is conscious. It is the slow ambient pressure of a system that wants from you. When the pressure is taken away, the sentence has more freedom. It can be longer if it needs to be, or end on a word that doesn't quite resolve. It can be clumsy. Or utterly without rhythm.

For a painter or a photographer this is more than a preference. The work I am interested in making asks for time. Layered surfaces. Returned-to images. Mistakes that turn into the painting. None of this performs well on a scroll. A scroll is built to move you past things, not to keep you standing in front of them. A painting on a wall, in a room of paintings, asks the opposite - stay, look, come back next week. I want a page to behave a little more like the room and a little less like the scroll.

I have a choice.. The feed wants speed and frequency and a graph that goes up. The room wants atmosphere, and time, and the kind of reader who comes back because something in the corner caught them on the way out. I have spent years inside the feed, sometimes happily, sometimes not. I would like, now, to try the room. The room earns a different kind of attention. Smaller, slower, perhaps more loyal. The room is harder to grow. It is also harder to mistake for something else.

I don't yet have a steady rhythm and I am trying not to invent one before I know what I'm doing. Fortnightly, probably. Maybe longer. Some weeks will pass with nothing. There will be a video that doesn't quite work and a photograph that does and a sentence I find a year later that leaves me scratching my head in confusion. I am trying to make a place where those things can happen, rather than a feed that needs perfection and polish.

I am aware that rewilding can be a kind of self-congratulation. The clever person opting out of the noisy thing. There is a version of this essay that is smug, and a version that is sentimental, and a version that is, in the end, just a complicated way of saying I want fewer notifications. I have tried not to write any of those. What I am after is closer to what the field is after - complexity, wonky edges, insects, the unexpected.

So this is the corner of that field. It will not be tidy. It will not be optimised. It will not perform to the crowd. It will be a place where the writing and the images can take longer to become whatever they are going to become. A tangled forest not a politely ordered plantation.

A short technical aside, in case you wonder what Ghost actually is.

Ghost is open-source software, run by a small non-profit, used by independent writers to publish on their own terms. The email list is mine. The site is mine. The domain is mine. If Ghost itself disappeared tomorrow, I could pick the whole thing up and move it elsewhere without losing a subscriber.

It is also, almost incidentally, part of what is being called the Fediverse - the federated universe, a web of stand-alone platforms that can have a conversation with one another through an open protocol called ActivityPub. Mastodon is the best-known of these. There is Pixelfed for photography, PeerTube for video, and increasingly WordPress, Flipboard, Tumblr and Threads have begun to plug in too.

Ghost has a good way of putting it: think of it as email. I'm on one provider, my brother is on another, my bookkeeper is on something older still, and none of us thinks about it. We can write to each other. No one is in charge of email. No one decides to show your messages to a smaller audience because some algorithm is in a bad mood. The Fediverse is that, for social media and publishing.

It is not a utopia. It is smaller. You will not find the easy hit of a viral moment here; the architecture does not encourage it. What you have is closer to the early web: readers who are there because they want to be. People following you for you, not because a computer told them you were worth their time.

So this site, only a few weeks old, is unobtrusively part of that wider network. A reader on Mastodon can follow Studio Atlantic, and when I post, it lands in their feed alongside their friends and the writers they like. They can chime in and I will see it here. There is no gatekeeper, no company that might up and leave tomorrow. It is one small field, connected to the others by hedgerows that anyone can use.